cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/596865

Following on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling in Sackett v. EPA in May, the Biden administration recently approved an amendment that weakens Clean Water Act protections for wetlands. The EPA regulation language on wetlands was amended — while excluding the standard public review process — with EPA administrator Michael Regan stating there was “no alternative” due to the court’s ruling.

Despite claims from the Biden administration and the EPA that their hands are tied, the Sackett ruling — along with any other Supreme Court rulings — could be overturned by Congress if the political will existed to do so. While many individual states could pass their own protections for wetlands that supersede the EPA regulations, 20 U.S. states have statutes in place that prohibit them from having regulations that are more stringent than federal regulations. Environmental organizations, Native tribes and others are opposing the Supreme Court ruling and EPA regulation change, and there are likely to be lawsuits against this rollback of wetland protections.

More than 50% of U.S. wetlands have been destroyed since colonization began. Why does this matter? Who wants a swamp in their backyard anyway?

Developers and agricultural interests have led the charge of draining, filling in and paving over wetland areas, which are everything from ephemeral vernal pools, swamps, bogs, and coastal salt marshes, to waterlogged floodplains around rivers and lakes. Many wetlands disappear above ground during dry times and re-emerge during rainy periods. All wetlands are crucial to flood prevention and drought, acting as sponges for rainfall and holding water above or below ground during dry times to continue feeding plant life. Just one acre of wetland can store over one million gallons of flood waters.

More in the link!

cross-posted from: https://ls.buckodr.ink/post/338745

Ecosia is great in general, they've done stuff like this before for wildfires and such, and they are carbin negative and use 100% of their profits for helping the planet

The search engine is also pretty good too!

Hailed as the largest freshwater lake in China, Poyang Lake in east China's Jiangxi Province is a famous scenic spot with spectacular scenery. But recently, the water level in Poyang Lake dropped rapidly.

As of 8: 00 a.m. on September 10, the water level of Poyang Lake Duchang Hydrometric Station was seen at 11.89 meters, and the water level of Xingzi Station, which is the landmark hydrometric station of Poyang Lake, has dropped to 11.98 meters.

According to the local hydrology department, on July 20, Poyang Lake's water level fell below the low water line - which is at 12 meters - making 2023 the earliest year to enter the dry period since 1951.

It is expected that rainfall in Jiangxi Province will not be frequent in September, therefore Poyang Lake will enter a continuously receding period under this circumstance.

UN warns the scale of dredging has a devastating effect on biodiversity and coastal communities.

Almost six billion tonnes of sand and other sediment are extracted from the world’s seas and oceans every year on average, according to the United Nations.

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warned on Tuesday of the devastating toll on biodiversity and coastal communities, adding that the scale of dredging was growing, with dire consequences.

“The scale of environmental impacts of shallow sea mining activities and dredging is alarming,” said Pascal Peduzzi, who heads UNEP’s analytics centre GRID-Geneva.

He pointed to the effects on biodiversity, as well as on water turbidity, and noise effects on marine mammals.

The UNEP launched a global data platform on sediment extraction in marine environments, Marine Sand Watch, which uses artificial intelligence to track and monitor dredging activities of sand, clay, silt, gravel and rock in the world’s marine environment.

It uses so-called Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals for ships combined with artificial intelligence to identify the operations of dredging vessels, including in hotspots like the North Sea and the East Coast of the United States.

The signals emitted by the vessels allow “access to the movements of every ship on the planet”, Peduzzi was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

‘Gigantic proportions’

The platform estimates that out of some 50 billion tonnes of sand and gravel used by humanity each year, between four and eight billion tonnes come from the world’s oceans and seas.

“This represents six billion tonnes on average every year, or the equivalent of more than one million dump trucks every day,” Peduzzi said.

He pointed out that “our entire society depends on sand as a construction material”. At the same time, sand plays a vital environmental role, including protecting coastal communities from rising sea levels.

Data analysed for the years 2012 to 2019 shows the scale of dredging is growing and that the world is approaching the natural replenishment rate of 10 to 16 billion tonnes of sediment washed into its oceans each year.

This is especially concerning for regions where dredging is more intense and extraction already substantially surpasses the sediment budget from land to sea, said the report.

Tipping point

While the tipping point has not been reached at a global level, Peduzzi cautioned during a press conference that in some localities, “we are extracting it faster than it can replenish itself”.

“This is not sustainable,” he added.

The North Sea, Southeast Asia and the East Coast of the United States are among the areas with the most intense marine dredging.

However, international practices and regulatory frameworks vary widely.

While some countries, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia, have banned marine sand export in the last 20 years, others lack any legislation or monitoring programmes.

China, followed by the Netherlands, the US and Belgium have the biggest dredging fleets, Arnaud Vander Velpen, a GRID-Geneva sand industry expert, said.

Peduzzi described extraction vessels as giant vacuums, cleaning seabeds, and “sterilising” them, warning that this leads to the disappearance of oceanic microorganisms and threatens biodiversity.

Activists in both countries complain that regulators prioritize the economic well-being of polluting industries over the environment and public health.

This story was co-published with Public Health Watch and Houston Landing.

People living on the east side of Harris County, Texas, have an unlikely bond with residents of Berre-l’Étang in southern France: They all inhale toxic chemicals from plants owned by LyondellBasell, one of the world’s largest petrochemical companies.

In the summer of 2020, LyondellBasell’s 2,471-acre industrial complex in Berre-l’Étang had more than half a dozen major incidents in which flares released large amounts of chemicals into the air. Thick clouds of smoke drifted over the community of 14,000. The flares burned so brightly, photographs show, that the normally pitch-black night was replaced by what looked like a prolonged sunset. The smoke carried benzene and other toxic substances to Marseille, France’s second-most-populous city, 10 miles away.

A year later in Texas, two major chemical releases at LyondellBasell facilities in Harris County forced residents of Jacinto City, Galena Park, and neighboring towns to shelter indoors. One of those incidents killed two workers and sent dozens to area hospitals.

Last year Public Health Watch and the Investigative Reporting Workshop examined LyondellBasell’s record in Harris County, and that project made us curious about the company’s performance outside the United States. We chose to look at Berre-l’Étang because both it and Harris County are at the center of their countries’ petrochemical industries — and both struggle to balance the economic benefits they gain with the concerns of residents who are breathing noxious fumes.

In eastern Harris County, 10 oil refineries process 2.6 million barrels of crude oil a day, and thousands more facilities store or manufacture the chemicals the industry uses and produces. Petrochemical plants loom over houses and playgrounds. A terminal holding millions of barrels of chemicals is seven blocks from a middle school.

Berre-l’Étang lies in one of the most heavily industrialized areas of France, where it and nine other towns surround a 60-square-mile lake, Étang de Berre. A 2017 study of some of those towns found that 63 percent of the population had at least one chronic disease. The French national average is 37 percent.

Local officials in France appear to have even less power to deal with industrial emissions than those in Texas, where state regulations are notoriously lax. Activists in both countries complain that regulators prioritize the economic well-being of polluting industries over the environment and public health.

In 2018, Éliane Jurado, a retired teacher living in Berre-l’Étang, created a citizens platform, LibAIRté, pledging to “defend the air quality of my grandchildren until my last breath.” LyondellBasell’s 2020 flaring — a process that burns off excess gas and relieves pressure — galvanized support for the movement and forced the city government to organize a town-hall meeting.

But in the end, Jurado says, nothing happened. She left Berre-l’Étang in 2021 and is still looking for someone to take over LibAIRté’s Facebook group, which at one point had 1,300 members.

A LyondellBasell spokesperson said the company declined to comment for this story.

read more : https://grist.org/health/in-a-small-french-town-where-houston-based-lyondellbasell-is-a-fixture-residents-complain-of-unending-pollution/

A new study underscores an enduring nuclear legacy as Japan releases wastewater from Fukushima into the Pacific.

This story was originally published by Grist.

A new study found trace amounts of nuclear waste in sea turtles in the Marshall Islands and five locations in the continental United States, underscoring the enduring legacy of nuclear testing and weapons development.

The analysis, published in the journal PNAS Nexus, looked at turtle and tortoise shells at locations tied to nuclear testing including Southwestern Utah, the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range in Arizona.

Cyler Conrad, an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico who led the study along with 22 other researchers, said the team found evidence of uranium radionuclides in the shells of turtles and tortoises at all five sites. He added that contamination amounts were so small that it’s doubtful the animals experienced health impacts.

“If you take a paperclip and divide it a million times, if you take a millionth piece of that and divide it another million times, that’s about the same quantity that we’re measuring in some of these shells,” Conrad said.

Still, Conrad says the findings are significant because they illustrate how turtles and tortoises, in part due to their long lives and metabolic processes, are able to retain nuclear contamination in their tissues. According to Conrad, turtle shells grow in a sequential style, similar to tree rings, and record isotopic elements such as uranium-236 from spent nuclear fuel.

The study is the first that Conrad knows of that identifies nuclear contamination in turtles in the Marshall Islands, but it’s far from the first to find evidence of historical, military-related pollution in wildlife there. In 2019, a U.S. Army study found dangerous levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, more commonly known as PCBs, and arsenic in fish around Kwajalein Island in the Marshalls, which has served as a U.S. military base for decades and is currently part of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site.

PCBs are synthetic organic chemicals that are long-lasting in the environment and can be harmful to human health. Another recent study found pollution in fish, including high levels of mercury and lead, surrounding several Marshallese atolls.

The paper also builds upon decades of research illustrating how nuclear waste bioaccumulates in sea creatures. Conrad said the study’s methodology of analyzing shells is new, but noted past studies have found previous evidence of radionuclides in turtles. A 2020 study of sea turtles in the Montebello Islands found contamination of turtle eggs and tissues.

The findings coincide with Japan’s decision to release treated, contaminated wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. The move prompted China to ban seafood from Japan, inspired protests in Fiji and South Korea and has particularly frustrated Indigenous peoples in the Pacific who have spent decades fighting against the dumping of nuclear waste in the region. Between 1946 and 1958, the Marshall Islands were the site of 67 U.S. nuclear tests, leading to health and environmental harms that the Indigenous people of the islands continue to grapple with.

Conrad hopes the study inspires more research into turtles and tortoises and how they record nuclear history.

“They’re taking in all of this information, they’re depositing this, and they’re acting as a really critical library for us to be able to reconstruct the history of the world in different ways,” Conrad said. “They’re experiencing what humans are experiencing and they’re able to record this in a very unique way.”

Supposedly eco-friendly cups are still coated with a thin layer of plastic, which scientists have discovered can leach chemicals that harm living creatures.

The world goes through hundreds of billions of single-use coffee cups every year—and most aren’t recycled. So major coffee chains’ switch to paper cups is a good step, right? Not quite.

A recently published study shows that paper cups can be just as toxic as conventional plastic ones if they end up littered in our natural environment. Seemingly eco-friendly paper cups are coated with a thin layer of plastic to keep their contents from seeping into the paper, and this lining can emit toxic substances. “There are chemicals leaching out of these materials,” says lead author Bethanie Carney Almroth, an associate professor of environmental science at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

When trying to assess the environmental impact of takeaway coffee cups, most experiments have focused on plastic lids and polystyrene cups. Paper cups have long been spared scrutiny. To address this oversight, Carney Almroth and her colleagues tested the effects of paper and plastic cups on midge larvae, which are commonly used in toxicity tests. The cups were placed in temperate water or sediment and left to leach for up to four weeks. The larvae were then kept in aquariums containing the water or sediment tainted by the paper and plastic cups. Regardless of the source of the contamination, the larvae grew less in the sediment, and exposure to the tainted water also hindered their development.

The ecotoxicologists didn’t perform chemical analyses to see which substances had leached from the paper cups into the water and sediment, though Carney Almroth suspects that a mix of chemicals caused the damage. But it’s hard to say more, given that it’s not known which materials are present. “This would all be much easier if companies were required to tell us what they use in their products,” she says.

Coffee cups are made of a complex mixture of synthetic materials and chemicals. Manufacturers add processing aids, heat stabilizers, and other substances, many of which are known to be toxic. Even if plant-derived materials are used—such as polylactic acid, a material derived from corn, cassava, or sugarcane that’s used to coat paper cups—cup makers often add a number of other chemicals during processing.

Chemical analyses can sometimes shed light on the composition of the substances present in a plastic or paper cup, but even these tests can’t always identify what’s there, says Jane Muncke, who is an environmental toxicologist by training and now managing director of the Food Packaging Forum, a Switzerland-based science communication organization. The exact substances are “unknown not only to the scientists who carry out these analyses, but also to the people who produce and sell the packaging.” During the manufacture of plastic-containing products, unintentional chemical reactions can take place between the materials used to create new substances.

Chemicals can also be harmful because of the specific combinations they are used in, Muncke adds—something known as “mixture toxicity.” It thus makes little sense to regulate the amounts of individual substances in cups, she says, because you still can’t be sure what impact they’ll have.

Improving recycling practices would be a logical step in trying to keep harmful chemicals from ending up in nature, but researchers say it’s best to retire disposable paper cups altogether. It’s difficult for most recycling centers to separate the plastic coating from the cup’s paper. In the UK, for instance, a mere handful of recycling centers take paper cups. Many coffee shops will collect them for recycling—but having to drop paper cups off takes the convenience out of a single-use product. Today, only four out of every 100 paper cups are recycled in the UK.

Plus, leaching chemicals isn’t just a problem when paper cups are littered—it can begin when a cup is used. In 2019, a research group from India filled paper cups with hot water to see if plastic particles or chemicals were released. “What came as a surprise to us was the number of microplastic particles that leached into the hot water within 15 minutes,” Anuja Joseph, a research scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, wrote in an email. On average, there were 25,000 particles per 100 ml cup. The researchers also found traces of harmful chemicals and heavy metals in the water and plastic lining, respectively.

“Reusable” cups aren’t necessarily much better when it comes to leaching, as they are often made of plastic; heat and wear accelerates leaching, and acidic drinks like coffee absorb chemicals more easily. The carbon footprint of reusable plastic cups is also disputable: A reusable cup has to be used between 20 and 100 times to offset its greenhouse gas emissions compared to a disposable one, according to some estimates. Blame the high amount of energy needed to make the reusable cup durable and the hot water needed to wash it. That said, a reusable plastic cup at least has the potential to last longer and is easier to recycle.

For Carney Almroth, reusable plastic cups aren’t the answer; fewer raw materials should be extracted and processed into plastics, she believes. “But we also need to look at the alternatives that are put forth as we make a shift into something more sustainable to make sure that we’re not just replacing one product with another,” she says. Carney Almroth is part of a coalition of scientists contributing evidence to the negotiations for a global plastics treaty. Those talks will continue in Kenya this November.

In the meantime, the search is on for safer and more sustainable solutions. Some companies have baked edible cups made of waffles or biscuits, or have used an origami-like technique to fold paper into cups. Both Carney Almroth and Muncke see the potential for companies to use established materials to shape a circular economy. Then the coffee shops could more easily replace their low-cost plastic and paper cups.

Take glass, for instance, which keeps drinks warm for longer—its low thermal conductivity slows the heat in the liquid from dispersing in the cup—and it is chemically inert, meaning no leaching (even the glaze of a ceramic cup is slightly soluble and can leach out to some degree). But although glass is infinitely recyclable, it has a higher environmental footprint than plastic. It’s made from natural raw materials such as sand, which have to be mined and melted at very high temperatures.

Stainless steel, a metal commonly used for reusable water bottles, is another contender. But coffee in steel cups cools faster than it would in ceramic and glass cups because the heat is transferred to the material and then to the palm of your hand. However, the material is more robust, making it good for on-the-go drinks.

Regardless of which material proves successful, moving away from disposable cups will take innovative business models and approaches, says Muncke. By this, she means companies finding a viable way to rent out and collect reusable cups, wash them appropriately, make sure they’re not contaminated, and then put them back into circulation. “The difficult thing is changing people’s behavior and building all the infrastructure. And that costs a lot of money.” Convenience and cheapness will make disposable cups hard to overthrow.